The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Parasites In The Lands Of The Infidels - Alberto M. Fernandez

by Alberto M. Fernandez

--what is to
be done with these vagabond radicalizers who seek to use the freedoms of
liberal democracies to undermine them and to poison the minds of Muslim youth
in the West?

The concepts of exile and refuge
are ancient ones existing across many civilizations and cultures. The Ottoman
Empire and other Muslim states provided refuge for newly stateless Sephardic
Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula by the Catholic kings. The Ottomans
even sheltered Lutheran Christians from Habsburg persecution. The U.S., from
its beginning, has served as a refuge for all sort of political and religious
refugees fleeing persecution elsewhere. Communist revolutionary Karl Marx found
refuge in Victorian London after having to flee Continental Europe. He found shelter
in the very empire and political-economic system he wished to see overthrown.

For decades
now, Western countries have served as places of refuge for many Muslims fleeing
repression by fellow Muslims in their own countries. Most foreign-born Muslims
are doubtless deeply grateful for this sanctuary. Some may be born or grow up
in the West in first-generation immigrant families, but at some point acquire a
deep hatred or revulsion for the very country that has mercifully taken them in,
as seen, for example, with the Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston
Marathon bombing in 2013.

Radicalization
of second-generation Muslim immigrants, first in Europe and now in the U.S., is
now a distinct, ongoing phenomenon.[1] Salafi-jihadism, of course,
already provides a readymade ideological construct and justification – that of Al-Wala wal-Bara (loyalty and disavowal),
for radicalized Muslims living under non-Islamic rule to follow.[2]

This important
and pernicious principle provides an extremely detailed object lesson in
alienation, and a blueprint for potential treason. An English-language website
set up by "students" of the influential Arab-American Islamist
preacher Ahmed Musa Jibril explains that Al-Wala
(loyalty) is to be only to God and believers while disavowal (al-Bara) means hatred for the infidels,
not imitating them in any way, not living in the lands of the infidels, not
helping them, or being compassionate towards them.[3]
The material seems to be taken verbatim from prominent Saudi cleric Salih Al-Fawzan,
in an English translation made available online by the Salafi community in
Calgary, Canada years ago.[4]

But while
alienated children of migrant families are a real concern, perhaps more
problematic, and certainly more notorious, are foreign adult open supporters of
Salafi-jihadism who use the West as a platform to poison the minds of young
Muslims, to rage against the very countries that shelter them, and to express
their loyalty to the very terrorist groups that are openly committed to the
destruction of these Western societies where they are living. These are not
children, identity-challenged teens, or local converts, but fully formed
extremists battening like parasites on the "infidel" lands they
despise while braying for the destruction of their hosts. Although native-born
extremists like Anjem Choudary are very similar in their discourse, I am not
focusing on people like him in this piece but on a very specific subset of the
jihadosphere.[5]

Much of this
extreme discourse is nested in the venue of the pulpit. Extremist clerics flee
the region and take up where they left off, preaching poison in mosques to
emigres and their children. Others are recruited. In Spain's Catalonia region,
at least a third of all mosques are controlled by Salafis, and their number has
increased from 21 in 2001 to 79 in 2016. Support from Salafi institutions in
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait is tangible. Catalonian police fear that the greatest
result of this trend is not yet terrorism but self-imposed social isolation.[6] Examples of Islamist clerics
in the West attacking Jews and Christians and preaching an open discourse of
violent Islamist supremacy are numerous,[7]
although some opt for a more muted way of talking.[8]

But other
foreign-born Muslim clerics, in both Europe and the U.S., have called for
tolerance, and even sought to creatively expand liberal and humanistic
discourses within Islam. In Virginia, scholar Dr. Ahmed Subhi Mansour weds
Muslim women to non-Muslim men, promoting a religiously grounded view rejected
by many Muslim jurists worldwide – i.e. that Muslim women have the same rights
as Muslim men to marry outside their faith.[9]
In France, Imam Amine Najdi has noted that Muslims are French citizens in every
sense of the word "who abide by and respect the laws of this country."[10] Even some Salafis have been
quite open in their criticism of their Salafi-jihadi rivals.[11]

Extremist
religious discourse may be a concern, but religious freedom has been and should
always be a cornerstone of Western democracies. Certainly democratic states
have every right to provide oversight of foreign clerics, exercise due
diligence, and take action against them, but protections for free expression
and free exercise of religion are precious and need to be safeguarded. As a
Christian, I would want that for Muslims just as I would fight for it for my
own coreligionists.[12] But I would also think that
Western governments could do more to ensure that foreign clerics allowed in to
minister domestic flocks are not extremists.[13]

But while much
Islamist discourse can and should be protected in Western democracies, surely
some speech is beyond the pale. What about foreign extremists based in the West
who openly swear allegiance to terrorist organizations – organizations which
repeatedly call for attacks on the West?

An early
example of this sordid reality is Egyptian Islamist Hani Al-Sibai, who came to the
United Kingdom in 1994 and claimed refugee status. Despite a high profile on
pan-Arab media, multiple outrageous comments,[14]
and various legal measures taken against him, he is still in London. Al-Sibai,
who has several times clashed with MEMRI for calling him an extremist, lives in
an expensive West London home subsidized by Her Majesty's Government.[15]

Al-Sibai was
accused in 2016 of playing a key role in the 2012 radicalization of two UK
Muslims of Sudanese origin who joined the Islamic State.[16]
He also influenced ISIS executioner Muhammad Emwazi (aka Jihadi John) and the
gunman who killed vacationing British tourists in Tunisia.[17]
It is not known if Al-Sibai has a sense of humor (he once noted that the
English insulted Turks by calling an animal they eat a turkey),[18] but if he does, he has
plenty to laugh about in doing such damage while being funded by the infidel
taxpayer.

Hani Al-Sibai
is a well-known figure in the jihadosphere, but many of the other extremist
parasites, such as Malik Fndy in Germany, seem to have a much more reduced
circle of influence. Fndy, a graduate student at the Technical University of
Darmstadt, was briefly arrested after several videos he made and posted on
Facebook came to light in February 2016. In them, he pledged his loyalty to
ISIS, and justified the burning alive of Jordanian pilot Muath Al-Kasasbeh and
stoning of women accused of adultery. After watching the video of the pilot's
burning, he rhapsodized, "I am filled with great pride of my support for
this State, which raises the banner of my religion, whether the infidels and
apostates like it or not, and defends my honor and blood of my folk from the
aggressor pigs."[19]

I appeared last
year on one of Al-Jazeera's best-known (or most notorious, take your pick) talk
shows to debate, in Arabic, the Sweden-based Iraqi "researcher" Nuri Al-Muradi,
yet another open, Europe-based ISIS supporter.[20]
Even though a non-native speaker of Arabic is at an obvious disadvantage
against someone speaking in his own language, I felt it important to try to
challenge Al-Muradi, especially on the basic contradiction of an avowed ISIS
supporter living in and paying taxes to the infidel Kingdom of Sweden. As often
happens with these types, he refused to confront the basic contradiction of his
position.

Al-Jazeera did
give him a podium to brazenly claim that bloody Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad
was a Zionist, Masonic, Western creation. I responded that Assad and his crimes
were 100% a product of the political pathologies of the Arab world.

The issue is
not a mere matter of divided loyalty. It is important to underscore that ISIS's
own ideology does not allow for gray areas when it comes to loyalty and enmity
towards others (including non-ISIS supporting Muslims). For the Islamic State,
a supporter is not just bound to dislike non-Muslims or un-Islamic practices;
he must be actively hostile to them. Failure to oppose unbelief would then be
itself akin to unbelief.[21]

So what is to
be done with these vagabond radicalizers who seek to use the freedoms of
liberal democracies to undermine them and to poison the minds of Muslim youth
in the West? One of the commonly expressed fears about democracies confronting
a terrorist threat is that of fighting fire with fire, of governments
supposedly overreacting and using extreme methods to fight extremism. That has
been part of the public debate on issues such as waterboarding or drone
strikes.

In the case of
these jihadi public amplifiers, the challenge is often seen as one of
safeguarding free speech and free expression in democratic states that allow
unpopular, minority, or hateful speech. That certainly has to be a concern,
although the limits on speech in European democratic states are already more
constrained than they are in the U.S.

Western
governments also seem to be uneasy, or adrift, about the ideological (or
political-religious) threat represented by Salafi-jihadi groups like ISIS and
Al-Qaeda. Forgetting its own past, much of the West sees itself as comfortably
post-modern, logical, and reasonable, and beyond the passions raised by
political or religious ideologies. And yet it was only about 40 years ago that
Marxist-Leninist armed factions radicalized young people on university campuses
and carried out open acts of terrorism in Western Europe and the U.S.[22]

Obviously, such
extremist voices need to be vigorously challenged in the public sphere, but
that is not enough. Europe faces a particular problem in that the European
Court of Human Rights has been repeatedly used by lawyers for avowed terrorist
supporters to evade deportation. Iraqi Kurdish jihadi Mullah Krekar has now
enjoyed a quarter century of European hospitality, while constantly plotting
terrorist actions and threatening officials in Norway.[23]
One of the organizations he helped set up was a precursor to the Islamic State.[24] The long legal and
political road of Krekar has had many twists and turns, but it seems that he
may be on the verge of extradition – to Italy, rather than to the Middle East.[25]

If talk about
reforming some of the institutions of the European Union actually leads to
something tangible, one would hope that loopholes allowing open supporters of
terrorist groups to abuse European liberties would be eliminated.[26]

Such a step is
important for two basic reasons. Two elements in the ongoing discourse of
Salafi-jihadis such as the Islamic State is that the West is basically weak and
that the West believes in nothing. Showing that illiberal, totalitarian speech
has real-world consequences punctures the ISIS and jihadi "victory
narrative" as surely as military defeat in the region. It also strengthens
OUR own narrative that the Western liberal democratic order is something worth
defending, that it is both welcoming and tolerant but also powerful and
confident. A democratic state incapable of defending itself and of standing up
for what it believes in is more to be pitied than feared by extremists – if they
knew pity instead of cruelty.

The challenge
for much of the West today is to be true to our ideals, to rediscover and
cleave to the best of our history and traditions, while also generously
demonstrating solidarity and compassion for others, for refugees and the
dispossessed, worldwide. Pope Benedict XVI warned against "a peculiar
Western self-hatred that is nothing short of pathological."[27] We should also show that we
are serious about protecting ourselves and what we claim to believe in. Open
supporters of jihadism who take refuge in the West and seek to subvert us
should know that there are real consequences to their actions. To do less is
not to show tolerance or understanding, but to show suicidal weakness.

Alberto M. Fernandez is Vice-President of MEMRI.Source: http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/9280.htm Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.